Christine opens with declaring that keywords should be at the heart of all search marketing – the first and most important step in SEO. Keywords, she says, are the single most important thing for site relevancy.

Reassuringly she notes that it’s important to get into the customer mindset using the example ‘duplicate a CD’ and ‘burn a CD': which would the customer look for: business jargon may work inside the industry, but mostly it’s not what customers search for.

Churchill is a fan of the long-tail term – they tend to be closer match and therefore convert better.

How to do Keyword Research

The referrer information ‘not provided’ has had a major impact. For information on not logged in customers, she suggests taking a look at Bing and PPC data – and Google webmaster tools. GWT comes with a caveat though – that it’s all data lumped together. You will need to filter the data, and it’s only there for 90 days.

She also suggests that site search is a valuable source of information.

She also suggests a brainstorming session – with some provisos: filter out negative people and avoid internal jargon.
Customers are a source that shouldn’t be overlooked, along with trade magazines and competitor sites.

To avoid keyword stuffing, finding synonyms can be really helpful.

Keyword Tools

Keyword tools help creativity.

Free ones include the Google keyword tool, although it’s been constantly changed, and it defaults to broad search. It’s also not that smart: a steel forge, for example, lead to a Dolly Parton reference. It can also help with translations. It works for most countries as google’s the biggest search engines, but be aware of the exceptions (Like Baidu in China). It can also check from Google’s perspective what a page is ranking for.

GWT – also free – will give you a lot of keyword data (with the provisos above) – and trends data can be really useful. It will also give you demographic information (even by region).

Google contextual marking tool – this can offer some great lateral thinking

Google Instant shows suggestions as you start typing – words are there because they’re popular

Soovle.com uses the Google Instant data combines with other sources and Keyword planner tool has not been widely released. It’s slated to replace the keyword tool, but Churchill notes that it’s a glitchy, limited issue beta with a clunky, slow ‘wizard’ with limited data output.

Wordtracker.com calls in data from many places

Keyword Discovery

Twitter search offers up hot searches

Ubersuggest (ubersuggest.org) can be useful

Video search: YouTube suggestions and keyword tools

Yahoo clues – offers head terms, not longtail

Quintura, visual search – useful for brainstorming

Related questions on Google and Ask can help

Like all good SEO professionals, Churchill loves Excel – she suggests putting terms in to a ‘bucket': a broad selection of terms. She then suggests creating a matrix.

Keyword Selection

Relevancy, popularity, user intent (and stage in the buying process), searcher behaviour. We need to get past popularity: popular phrases are competitive – a less popular phrase may both rank better and convert better.

The user intent is important: some terms will be for research, others – far fewer – will be for purchasing: 80% of searches on the web are non-commercial (Jim Lanzone of Ask.com).

Searcher behaviour can be navigational, informational or transactional.

Single word phrases are growing in popularity.

Evaluate by competitor: you need search term parity: how optimised are their sites, are they doing PPC, look at their linkage situation and anchor text.